My warm up activities start with journaling. Everyday students come
in and have to answer a question on the board. They have five minutes
a day, and two days to work on the same question. Some of the
questions were posted here some time ago, under aesthetic questions.

They were things like:
Can an object be considered a work of art today if it was not a work
of art when it was created?
Must art be made by hand?
Must art communicate something?
Must art be beautiful?
Who has the authority to say what is good or bad art?

Other questions I take right out of my curriculum:

How does technology effect the way we make our art?
Does where we live effect how we make art?
How do you tell stories without words?

Other questions were based on things I heard in the news:

Should the greeks be given back the Pantheon art taken from them in
the early 1800's? "We want our marbles back"
Should neighbors have a say in the kind of art you put on your front
lawn?(the resale rates are going down"
Are "The Gates" that were put in NY city, art?
Are the cows that are painted by different companies, organizations
and posed around the city, art?

Other questions are built around the seasons:
What would you give as a Christmas gift to the Mesopotamians?
What color would you say Christmas is , if you couldn't use red or
green?
What color is hope?

And some are just spontaneous:
If I picked up this driftwood off the beach, put a pricetag on it and
put it in an art gallery, is it art?
Respond to this quote by Pablo Picasso:
Is art made by a four year old better or worse than art made by
someone who says they are an artist, but has never had formal training?

They've been a lot of fun. I'm now using words from standardized
testing to make sure kids are learning how to respond in specific
ways. I ask questions with these words in them: Contrast, Compare,
Explain, Supposrt, Formulate, Evaluate, Analyze, Predict.